Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I understand under the procedure agreed to earlier, this side will now be recognized to offer an amendment. I understand Senator Carnahan has an amendment to offer. I understand we are ready to proceed to the Carnahan amendment. I was going to ask for a time agreement, but obviously we cannot proceed with a time agreement at this time. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. HARKIN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I join with the Senator from Arkansas and the Senator from Missouri in supporting this amendment. I compliment both Members for addressing this issue. I compliment the Senator from Missouri for offering this amendment and the Senator from Arkansas. This is something sorely needed. I hope it will have strong support. I hear a lot about this in the countryside. Quite frankly, in these tough times, more and more I think we will need the benefit of chapter 12. As I understand it, this does go back retroactively to last September, if I am not mistaken, and it will cover a number of farmers using chapter 12 proceedings and making it permanent. At least it lets them know it is going to be there from now on and we will not have to keep reauthorizing it. I ask to be added as a cosponsor of the amendment.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. HARKIN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. HARKIN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. HARKIN. I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Arkansas, Mrs. Lincoln, be in control of the time in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. HARKIN. I understand there is 1 hour 45 minutes evenly divided.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, this amendment is an important expansion of the Committee's nutrition title and I am proud to be a co-sponsor of the Durbin amendment along with Senator Lugar and others. It builds on our provisions to restore benefits to legal immigrant children without the 5 year waiting period and apply more reasonable food stamp eligibility rules to working, tax paying immigrants. The amendment will correct an aspect of welfare reform that went too far. Legal immigrants have made countless contributions to our country but many are now in trouble. They are disproportionately represented in the service jobs that have been hardest hit in the current recession. So now is an opportune time to make improvements to immigrant eligibility in the Food Stamp Program. I also want to focus on children for a minute. We have also heard that from 1994 to 1998, 1 million poor citizen children of immigrant parents, left the program . . . a 74 percent decline for this group. These are children who are entitled to participate in the program but whose parents were confused about eligibility. Do not be mistaken, this issue affects most States in our country. For example, more than half of all low-income children in California live with a non-citizen adult. Some of these children are citizens and others are immigrants. Between 30 percent and 40 percent of low income children in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, and New York live in families with a non-citizen. In my own State of Iowa, approximately 14 percent of low income children live in families with a non-citizen. We have seen time and again that in households where there are Food Stamp eligible children who live with a non-citizen adult, often time the adult does not seek out the assistance for the child. Taken together, the 1998 bill that restored benefits to some children which I supported, along with this amendment and our immigrant provisions in the underlying bill, will immediately help to prevent many children from going to bed hungry at night. Their parents, will also be able to participate in the program once they have worked in this country for at least 4 years or have resided in the U.S. for at least 5 years. Now, for anyone who argues that people would move to this country to wait five years to receive a ``generous'' food stamp benefit, I want to remind all of us that the average household received a benefit of $175 per month in 2000. A family of 3 working 30 hours a week in a minimum wage job got just over $250 per month. That same family working 40 hours per week at $7.50 an hour received under $70 per week. In fact, USDA just reported that food stamp recipients spend about 70 percent of their monthly benefits the first week and 90 percent by the end of the second week. People who participate in the Food Stamp Program are not living ``high on the hog'' and they are certainly not coming to this country for that benefit. Now, others before me have mentioned that 16 States spend their own funds to provide food assistance to legal immigrants made ineligible by welfare reform. Under this proposal, those States would now be able to devote their State dollars to other worthwhile and much needed initiatives. Finally, I, too, want to commend the President for including this provision in his 2003 budget proposal and Newt Gingrich who indicated that welfare reform went too far when it removed the ability of legal immigrants to participate in the Food Stamp Program. Again, I am pleased to join Senators Durbin, Lugar, and others in co- sponsoring this amendment that will help provide nutrition for this valuable group of people in our country.

Mr. HARKIN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, for the benefit of the Senators, I have a parliamentary inquiry. Under the unanimous consent agreement we have entered into, what is next?

Mr. HARKIN. The Dorgan-Grassley amendment is next, with 1 hour 45 minutes evenly divided?

Mr. HARKIN. And the vote will occur--at the end of that 1 hour 45 minutes?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, might I inquire of the situation. I understand the pending Lugar amendment is 60 minutes evenly divided. Could the Chair inform us about how much time is remaining on both sides?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. President, I have, as the Senator from Indiana knows, great respect for him. We have had a great working relationship on the Agriculture Committee. I daresay, without any fear of contradiction, that perhaps in most, if not almost all, of the present focus that we have on agricultural research and the changes that were made in research were because of the leadership of Senator Lugar. My friend from Indiana has been unafraid in what I call pushing the envelope in trying to think outside the box on agriculture, and maybe in some ways we find ourselves in a box on agriculture. I might be one of the first to admit that. We have over 60 years of Federal farm programs that have been designed, in essence, to try and support our farmers, our farm families, during periods of low prices, during periods when their income would fall basically due to no fault of their own. A lot of times my urban friends will ask me why do I have all of these farm programs. There is not the same thing for a hardware store, or the dry cleaning shop, or a number of other main street businesses. I always have to bring them through the process of why we are where we are, and that agriculture is really unlike a Main Street business in that there are so many variable factors beyond the farmer's control. We know the classic ones, of course: weather, the droughts, the hail, the rain, the cold, the heat, whatever it might be, those vagaries of weather. Now, to a certain extent we have over the years attempted to protect the farmer from those vagaries with different forms of insurance programs, but then sometimes those insurance programs do not meet all the needs. First, it was hail and fire. Now, we have gotten into all-crop, all- peril, all-risk insurance. We are doing that now so that has been helpful. So there is weather. Then there are the other vagaries of agriculture, and that is basically on the world market in which we now find ourselves. What one country might do, as in Brazil, in Argentina, or the countries of Europe, might drastically affect what happens to the farmers in this country. We do not have much control over that. Then there are the other vagaries of disease and pestilence, and so forth, that affect our livestock industries in this country. Of course, we continue to do research and to support APHIS, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and others, to help us in our continual battle against the infestation of either disease or pests in our crops and livestock. Put all of these things together and that individual farmer has literally no control over the marketplace, none whatsoever. It has often been said the farmer is the only person who buys retail and sells wholesale and pays the freight both ways. That basically is true. So we build up this elaborate network of farm support programs, to me, different vagaries of farming as we go through the years; different now than it was 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Our programs change, but they have the essential underpinning of ensuring that, No. 1, we will have an adequate supply of food and fiber for the citizens of this country, that we will have that food and fiber in a way that will ensure no one really goes hungry in this country. On that side of the ledger we have built up quite a system, also, of nutrition programs. The most famous is school lunch. But there are a lot of others. So we made it possible for this country to be the best fed and to have the largest variety and the most quantity at the cheapest prices of all sorts of food, especially wholesome food. There is some food that is not too wholesome, but at least in the wholesome foods that is true. That is a reason we have dairy programs. We found through the history of the dairy programs, when we had the spring flush, prices would go to nothing. A lot of farmers found that they could not make it. But in the middle of the winter, the price of milk would skyrocket and kids would be left without milk. We wanted to even this out. We came up with dairy programs to even that out. They have worked quite well overall. It is true we have an elaborate system of support programs. If we were starting over and we had a clean slate, we might start a system of equity such as the Senator is talking about. We are not starting with that clean slate. We have to take into account what has happened with land prices, what has happened in the local communities, what this would mean if we were to yank the rug out all of a sudden from under these programs. If our experience under the last farm bill, under the Freedom to Farm bill, had been different and we had some reason to believe that farm programs would be phased down and eliminated, maybe this would have been the right approach. We saw that was not going to happen under Freedom to Farm. So all of these programs have been woven into the fabric not only of our farms but of our rural communities, our schools, our businesses, our colleges, our transportation. Earlier we mentioned the value of land. Some may argue, rightfully so, we have a land bubble out there; we have prices of land, and the value of the commodity for that land cannot support that price. This is not speculative land, land near a city waiting to be developed. To a certain extent, some of the payments we have put out there in the past, in the last farm bill and the one before that and the one before that, going back for quite a ways, have had a more perverse effect than what we intended. It has, in fact, increased the price of land beyond what the productive capacity of that land could support. This has not created a good situation. We just had a vote on payment limitations, which I support. What has happened--I see it in my own State the way the farm program is structured--the bigger you are, the more you get; the smaller you are, the less you get. The payments go to the larger farmers. They then go out and bid up the value of the land above what the smaller farmers can get, or a beginning farm can do, and you get bigger and bigger farms. Since I was a kid, I have been watching farms get larger in my backyard. I come from a town of 150 people. I still live there. All the farms around my hometown are getting bigger all the time. Some of that was inevitable, due to mechanization, better equipment, better seed, better fertilizer, better control over pests. So the production kept going. That kept the price of our food very cheap in this country. It was inevitable that farmers would not stay with 40 acres and a mule; farms would get bigger. Over the last few years--I don't know if I could use a cutoff date, maybe 15 or 20 years--our farm programs have accelerated the process and have added to it and have made it worse, exacerbated it. We do have a land bubble. One might say we should not have a land bubble; land ought to be worth what it can produce or whatever it can bring on the market for speculative purposes but not based upon Government payments. I can accept that argument. What I cannot accept is pulling the rug out right now. We cannot do that. This has been built up over 60 years of time, and accelerated over the last perhaps dozen years, 15 or so years, maybe more. We have to be very careful how we approach modifying and changing what we do in agriculture and how we support our farmers. To make this drastic change right now would cause a collapse of land prices which would devastate a lot of farmers. In rural America, it is often said most farmers live poor and die rich. That has basically been true throughout my life. That is their retirement. The farm they have is their retirement. If we pull that out from underneath them, it will be like all the people with their pensions in Enron. Pull the rug out from underneath our farmers, let those land prices collapse, and we have treated them like Ken Lay treated the people at Enron. We do not want to do that. That would devastate our public schools that rely on the property tax in rural areas and our small towns. What to do, then, if that is the situation? Do we take a drastic turn, as my friend from Indiana wants to do? I hope not. That would be devastating. In other words, what we ought to do is try to work within the structure that we have and start to move this engine a little bit, just to move it a little bit, and start to change the way we do support agriculture. The bill before the Senate is a balanced bill in that regard. Yes, we do spend more money on commodity programs. We do because farmers need it. The Department of Agriculture estimated a couple weeks ago there will be a 20-percent drop in net farm income this year unless we come in with some kind of a payment. I ask anyone listening or watching to think of your own situation. What would you do for your family if this year you had a 20-percent drop in your net income? What would you do with your lives? What would happen to your kids? What would happen to your car? What would happen? Think of the farmers with a net income drop of 20 percent this year. I wish it were not so, but that is the fact. So we have more money on the commodity programs this year. However-- and this is a big but--this bill, developed with a lot of bipartisan input, through the committee process, amended on the floor as it has been amended and probably will be in the next couple of days, this bill puts more money in commodity programs, but we spend more on a broader agricultural constituency. We provide new--and more--conservation spending. That is income to farmers in a way that has never been done before. Before, we would say to the farmer: If you take your land out of production, we will pay you for it. That has sort of reached its limits. So now we say to the farmer: You be a good steward of the soil, you keep your soil from running off; you, livestock producer, make sure you don't have the manure runoff that is killing fish in the streams and fouling underground water; you, row cropper, cropping the hills, put in some buffer strips along the streams, put in some grass waterways; you on the plains, cut down on the wind, put in some windbreaks, do things like that, rather than plowing up the land; do ridge tilling, hold the soil down--we will pay you for it. That is a conservation security program to begin paying farmers to be good stewards. Many farmers are already doing that and this bill would not cut them out. This would not say they would have to do anything different. They would just have to continue what they are doing and they will get paid for it. That is a change. There are some in this Chamber--there were some in our committee--there are some who do not want to do that. The Cochran- Roberts bill that was offered as a substitute took that conservation out and threw it out the window. Fortunately, it only received 40 votes. But I think there is great support for that movement of beginning to pay all kinds of farmers, whether they grow row crops or livestock, orchards, vegetables, fruits--whatever it might be--to support their income in a way that provides a payoff and a better environment. So that is in this bill. We also have, for the first time, an energy title in this farm bill. If September 11 taught us anything, it ought to have taught us that we have to cut the oil pipeline to the Mideast. Again, do we want to cut it this year? No, we can't do that this year or next year because our energy system in this country is too dependent on it. But we ought to begin planning and doing things now that will get us off that oil pipeline. I daresay drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not one way to do that. That will still keep us hooked up to the oil pipeline. What we have to do is begin to look at our farms and our fields as the substitutes. Anything that can be produced from a barrel of oil can be produced from a bushel of soybeans or cottonseed or corn and other products. I visited a relatively small farm in northeast Iowa last weekend. The farm family there had agreed with the University of Northern Iowa that they would participate in a project to make axle grease out of soybean oil. If you look at it, it looks just like grease. Already they are working with large trucking companies to buy this grease for their fifth wheel, and working with I think the Norfolk Southern and other railroads to grease the railroad tracks with it. Why? Because it is totally biodegradable. Hydraulic fluids can all be made from soybean oil. In Cedar Rapids right now we have over 30 buses running on soy diesel. I think we have broken through a little bit on soy diesel, I say to my friend from North Carolina, because last week--I didn't see this, but I heard about it--on ``West Wing'' the television show ``West Wing'' that has to do with the President, I guess the President in ``West Wing'' was taking a trip to Cedar Rapids, IA. He said to his staff: Are we going to get picked up by one of those diesels running on soybeans? So we are making a breakthrough. People are now beginning to pay attention that buses can run on soybeans. It is all biodegradable. We have an energy title in this bill to try to start moving in that direction, $550 million, half a billion dollars in 5 years--I hope we can keep it--again, to begin to develop that, whether it is diesel or hydraulic fluids, grease, or ethanol. We haven't even scratched the surface on ethanol use in this country. We can do a lot more with ethanol, and the feed co-products can be used in feedlots. Biomass energy--we have a project in Iowa right now that we started a few years ago. I was able to get a modest change in the law to allow biomass production on conservation reserve program land, we set aside 4,000 acres in southern Iowa to grow switch grass. That switch grass is cut and then it is taken over to the Ottumwa, IA, coal-fired powerplant and put right in there with the coal to burn at the powerplant. See, a pound of switch grass has more Btus than a pound of coal. The problem is, a pound of switch grass is this big, and a pound of coal is that big. But they burned it last year in the boiler. It worked just fine. So now John Deere is working on developing new kinds of equipment that will cut the switch grass and put it in little bundles so it will make it easier to transport and put in the furnaces. Biomass energy, renewable every year. It will cleanup the environment and give farmers some additional source of income. Wind energy--the largest wind farm in the world is located in Iowa. Interestingly enough, it was built by Enron. But it is there. So there are provisions in our bill--we have an energy title in our bill to begin to promote that and give a new market for farm products. That is what we have to do. We have to find new markets for what these farmers grow. One of the biggest markets out there--a huge market that can absorb a lot of our commodities--is the energy market. So why should we be paying all this money to Saudi Arabia and the Mideast or go up and drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, when we have it right here on our lands. So that is another part of the bill that begins to move us in some different directions. We have a strong rural development program in this bill to provide for broadband access to our small towns and communities. Those are things that will help bring jobs to smaller towns in rural America. All in all, what I am trying to say is in this bill we tried to balance a lot of things. I say to my friend from Indiana, if I were a dictator, would I have written a different bill? I probably would. He would have, too. But we have a lot of interests here that we have to try to balance. All in all, I believe the bill is a balanced bill and it will support farm income with countercyclical payments. That is another new provision in this bill, a countercyclical program. When prices go down, we support farm income. We don't let farm income go below a certain level. Then we have direct payments also, which we hope will phase out, phase down, and bring in the countercyclical. That was the problem with Freedom to Farm. They were phasing down the direct payments, but they never replaced them with anything, so every year we would come in and appropriate new money. In our bill, if prices fall, the countercyclical payments would kick in. So I will oppose the amendment of my friend only because of that reason. I think to make that big of a change right now could really disrupt a lot of rural America. I say to my friend, I think sometimes-- what is that old saying?--when you are up to your eyeballs in alligators, it is hard to remember who forgot to drain the swamp. You just want to get out of there. Maybe it is a little hard to think about how did we get in this mess. We are faced with a situation where we have to save our farms and rural America, and that is what we are attempting to do in this bill. I hope, working together this year, next year, and in the ensuing years, we can begin to examine some other changes that we might make in the structure of agricultural programs, with the goal being, I hope, continuing to provide abundant food and fiber to our people at a reasonable price but also with the goal of enlivening and rebuilding rural America. In every poll I have ever seen, when people are asked if they would rather live in a large city or a smaller community, all other things being equal, overwhelmingly people would rather live in the smaller community. But if you do not have good schools, decent jobs, decent recreation, and decent transportation, then things aren't equal. So people tend to gravitate towards larger communities. I hope our view for the future is of enlivening and rebuilding rural America, and enabling younger people to go into farming. We have some of the finest agricultural schools in America--including those in Indiana and Iowa. When you go to those agricultural schools, you see young people who are smart. They know how to do things. A lot of them have experience working on the farms--maybe their family farms, or lives in a rural area. They are taking animal or plant science courses, or farm management courses. Ask any one of them if they are going to go into farming, and if they are going to be a farmer--only a very few, if they have parents with a farm free and clear that they hope to inherit--will they say yes. But if their parents have a little bit of land and they are renting more land, they are not going to be farmers. They are going to go into some kind of management, or some kind of agribusiness management. But they are not going to be a farmer. Ask them if they want to be a farmer. Would you like to be a farmer? Would you like to have land out there and do the things your parents and grandparents did? Almost 100 percent say yes. But the decks are stacked against them. I hope that is what we can look at as to how to revise and rebuild some of these farm programs in the future. I listened to the distinguished Senator from Indiana, my good friend. He went through his long dissertation on his amendment. I thought it was very thoughtful. As I say, there are a lot of things on which I agree with him. But I just do not think this is the time to do that. I think we ought to be thinking about how to change some of these things. But, as usual, my friend from Indiana is very thoughtful and provokes our thinking. In that way, I think this adds to this debate. But I hope that all in all we will not approve of the amendment. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. I agree, to the extent there are alternatives people can use. Obviously, though, as the Senator has said, the return you get off that is sometime down the road, not right now. And I think, just again, being a little bit parochial about it, in our area of the country, in the upper Midwest, there is a reason why we plant corn and beans. It is very suitable for that. There is some wheat, a little bit, some smaller grains, maybe up in Minnesota, the northern part up there, but in our area we are corn and beans. We plant those crops because that is what the land is productive for in that area of the country. It is very hard. We don't grow rice. Wheat is OK. We can get wheat, but that will just depress the price of wheat. We could grow wheat. But there is just not much else. When I was a kid--I am sure for the Senator as well--we had orchards. We had a lot of orchards, vegetable gardens, a short growing season. It was OK for the family, but to really make a living out of it wasn't too viable. So we are sort of stuck on corn, beans, maybe alfalfa, some hay, things like that, some sorghum--basically corn and beans. And then you have all your land tied up. You have your land and then your machinery, your equipment. You have all that fixed cost already there. I have a big combine. I put a lot of money in it, and it doesn't do much to plant black walnut trees. I can't get much money out of that to do that. I ask the Senator to think about something that was said to me at one time. I don't know if it is true, but it made sense to me economically--why agricultural economics is a little bit different. The farmer is sitting out there--think about your own land--the farmer is sitting out there, fixed land, has his equipment. Let's just take the farmer who doesn't have all the land paid for, may own some, and rent some. That is usually the case. He has equipment, some paid for, probably some he is still paying for. If the price of the commodity he is growing--let's say in this case corn or beans--goes down, the normal thought process is, other people would say, if the price goes down, the farmer would be a darn fool to plant any more of that. But the farmer goes out and plants more corn. Is he a darn fool? My response is, no. Because what he is thinking is: OK, I have my land out there. I have my equipment. I have all those fixed costs. The marginal cost of planting an additional acre always approaches zero. He doesn't know that, but that is what it is. So if I plant 100 acres, my cost may be whatever. If I add an additional 10 acres, the cost to plant that additional 10 acres is not as much as the first 100. If I plant an additional acre on the side of that, its cost is even less because I already have my equipment and all that stuff. The time involved is not that much. The farmer says: I have all that equipment. So if the price is down, I have to produce more. So if I was getting $2.50 for my corn, and now I am getting $1.80, I will just grow more corn. So it really is a perverse economic kind of thing, sort of counter intuitive--I ask my friend from Indiana if that might not be the case-- because farmers don't have control over everything. If I controlled everything, like General Motors, I could say, yes, I will cut down production. But each individual farmer out there with that fixed land, the equipment, his costs, his sunk costs, he says: If prices are down, I had better grow more. Does the Senator from Indiana have some sense that that happens sometimes?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, if I may respond to my friend, I understand what he is saying. Only a fifth of the farms in Indiana would be affected by this. It is probably about the same, I suppose, in Iowa. I do not know. But I still see that, again, these tend to be the bigger farms that have a lot of land. I still submit this could cause some derogation in the land values, and even though those at the bottom are getting a little bit more, their land prices might be affected by the bigger ones. So if those land prices go down, I think it might have a cascading effect on this. I say to my friend--I think we discussed this in the past--some land prices may be inflated by farm programs, but if the support has to be brought down, I think it has to be brought down over maybe a several year period of time, or something such as that. That is why I was hoping to get away from some kind of direct payment system to a countercyclical payment that is only based on prices at the time and to put more into conservation, put more into energy, and put more into programs that require producers to act. If there is something you have to do, then you can get paid for it, but it does not build into the land value. Because if you sell it to somebody else, and they do not do it, they do not get the payment. We have to try to get off the programs that continue to provide for an artificial land bubble out there--it is there; we have to recognize it--but I would be very careful about how we try to bring it down to some level in regard to what the productive capacity of that land is.

Mr. HARKIN. If my friend would yield for a little colloquy, I just ask my colleague again if he will elaborate a little longer on why the prices would tend to go up under the scenario he just described. I would think they would go down. But why does the Senator think the prices will go up?

Mr. HARKIN. I say to my friend from Indiana, I believe what he is saying is that farmers will get market signals. In other words, they are out there, and if the price goes down, they will plant less. So then you have a drop in prices, and farmers will plant less, and then the price will go back up. I assume that is what the Senator is saying.

Mr. HARKIN. I ask my friend: OK, if you are not going to plant that, what would the Senator plant? You have land. You have fixed costs.

Mr. HARKIN. That is the concern I have.

Mr. HARKIN. In a system such as that, my concern is the boom-and-bust cycle: Prices go all to heck for soybeans. So farmers say: OK, we are not going to plant soybeans. We are going to go to corn. So the price of soybeans booms up and then the price of corn goes down, and then they jump out of that and, say, get back into beans again. So you get these huge fluctuations.

Mr. HARKIN. So we are trying to keep at least some stability in there so you do not have those wild swings in prices.